I can understand why to an extent (people wanting to throw everything at the big bad lizard for no raisin), but it's turned from "don't do useless cross-tests" to "no cross-testing at all unless you can pull it off well" to "no cross-testing period". Like, every time anyone even suggests it everyone gets their panties in a bunch and completely shuts it down. I'm really trying to understand what's so bad about it that it can never be done, but I've only heard three explanations (that are so commonly used that I think they're just being mindlessly parroted at this point) and none of those were good reasons IMO. So, is there an actual reason beyond "no we don't like it"?

To preface, the following example is just something I came up with off the top of my head, I'm not trying to pitch an idea.

Let's say there's an SCP that can digitally store someone's mind and give it to someone else, basically a "body switcher" similar to what you'd see in some sci-fi cartoon. This, although not directly related to Able, would help us to better understand Able's "respawning" process. For example, if they switch Able's mind with someone else, if he comes back with his own mind we'd know it just cloned him, but if he came back with the other guy's mind it would imply otherwise. And even if he did come back as Able, whether or not he remembers what he did in the other guy's body or if the other guy still has Able's mind would imply different things. Would that be acceptable?

No, because A) Able, and B) once again, there is no consistency between articles. They don't work on the same principle, and there's no reason for us to believe that they do because of a lack of thematic unity.

If you want to write a tale about it, go ahead, but not in an article.

See, the problem here is while you have one part of the equation (i.e, a reason for the cross test), you don't have what I consider to be the second crucial part of it- the theme. Something that digitally stores minds an an ancient Sumerian fighter… well, they don't mesh very well. If you can find a a Sumerian artifact that does something which is relevant enough for the Foundation to test on Able (a dangerous Keter), then I can say the cross-test was worth while.

This is the shit I'm talking about. Why does it matter how many times it's been tested or how popular the article is if you have a good reason to do it, it adds to the article, and it's done well? At that point you'd just be hating it for the sake of hating it.

Yes, that's exactly it. I started this thread with the sole intention of setting myself above everyone else, including and especially those who are way better writers than me. You've found me out, Vezaz, you crafty bastard!

Seriously, though, that's a ridiculous assumption and I'm pretty sure this post was made solely as an insult.

You should also remember that while the scientific standpoint is important here, it is a distant second to the question of a good narrative, even in an SCP article. Will testing some mechanical SCP on Able make sense? Perhaps. Will it work from a narrative standpoint? Unlikely.

Anything can, but some narratives are far more likely to be well received than others, and some are much easier to screw up than others. Can a good, well received article about Able interacting with a body-switching machine be written? Possibly. Is it likely one will be written? No. This is mostly because anyone skilled enough to write such an article is also skilled enough to realize it's not a strong idea and would choose to direct his/her talents elsewhere.

In short, it's a choose your battles sort of deal- cross-testing can be done and done well, but it's a question of carefully choosing appropriate subject matter for them.

E: oh, and I never agreed with the "no bad ideas" thing. There is such a thing as bad ideas. That a good writer can sometimes rescue them is understandable, but the fact they need rescuing in the first place indicates something, I think.

The thing is, that first argument, the "people wanting th throw everything at the big bad lizard for no raisin", that doesn't just apply to 682, even though 682 is the SCP used most often. 90% of cross-tests are people taking other, usually completely unrelated SCPs and saying "Hey, lets introduce my SCP to this other, well-established SCP!"

And we're not completely against cross-testing. Hell, my one and only SCP article (SCP-445, I wrote 445 guys, you guys, hey you guys, 445, totally me you guys, hey) has a cross-test in it. But nobody complains because it makes sense to investigate the link between paper that takes on the properties of whatever it's folded into an an animate paper crane. It's just most of the time the cross-tests people suggest are terrible and suffer from being completely unnecessary.

Generally, cross-testing is seen as a way to make a badly-written SCP more popular by essentially piggybacking on the success of a more popular SCP. Wedging Able, 173, or 682 into an experiment log- especially if it's an SCP that doesn't really have anything to do with the other SCP in question- reeks of lazy writing. Bonus points if the SCP gets into a fight with the cross-tested SCP.

it's turned from "don't do useless cross-tests" to "no cross-testing at all unless you can pull it off well" to "no cross-testing period"

Uh.

From my time of being here.

It's actually been the opposite.

I even remember, like, a big announcement about cross-testing being ok'd again provided they weren't bad or useless.

Now, the definition of useless and bad cross testing is basically up to the reader, which is what the voting stuff is for.

But, yeah, do as Vezaz mentioned earlier. If you have an issue, be the example of what you want it to be. If you think that too many people are giving the thumbs-down for cross-testing, write the cross-test that is an example of good cross-testing. At the very least if you succeed, you will be adding to the site's repertoire of cross-tests done well. At the very worst, it will be a learning experience for all of us.

I think it was, because there was concern that if one of the articles got deleted, and another article linked to the deleted one… you get where I was going? There was an episode earlier involving a member asking a lot of their stuff deleted… and a lot of their stuff had a lot of cross tests… so you get the gist. I think that was a loooong time ago though.

EDIT: Also, it made no sense to be throwing two dangerous, unpredictable things together. I mean, from a logical standpoint.

Anyhow, everyone has their own thing they don't like. I personally have a dark dislike of expungements and redactions, for example. But that's just me. And that's why we have the voter system, so people who dislike itpurely because of the cross-testing's existence will also be counterbalanced by people who aren't so bothered by it and feel that it works for the article or whatever. I don't see a problem here, but that might be because I really need sleep right now and I'm missing the big point or whatever. Sure, some people have pet peeves. Sure, some people have really high standards. There ain't nothing wrong with that because at the end of the day, if you can write something involving cross testing that gets into the positives, more people liked it than not.

And if not, then you can re-examine what you did wrong, because more than likely one well-placed, well-used cross-test won't shut a whole article down.

Personally, I'm a fan of crosstests, assuming that they are handled extremely carefully. The problem is that far, FAR too many crosstests are of the "throw these 2 things into a blander1 and see what comes out!" wherein there's no in-universe reason for that testing to occur other than that the author thought it would be kewl. Same thing for cross-testing with famous articles: it reads like the author of the new crosstest is trying to piggyback off the fame of the other one in order to compensate for weakness in the new piece.

As for in-universe rationale for no or minimum crosstesting, remember that all this stuff is deeply weird, and a great deal of them are highly unpredictable. Crosstesting to things that you don't know why or how they do what they do is a recipe for Bad Things to happen. I specifically recall on crosstest that actually referenced this: they were using a D-class to test this one memetic cognitohazard, only he'd been previously exposed to a different one and put back in the general populace after an incomplete memory wipe. The two memes interacted and resulted in a new, more virulent & violent memetic hazard.

If you think about it, nothing is really predictable. For all we know, throwing a chocolate bar into a volcano can cause a ZK. If there's reason to believe it would cause some horrible thing to happen (sending Mr. Laugh to 231), of course you shouldn't do it, but to dismiss any cross-testing on the grounds that something bad has the slight possibility of happening is rather silly IMO.

…Ivo, it really sounds like you're almost deliberately missing my point, considering that you just agreed with it.

For one thing: chocolate into a volcano? Really?
For two thing: you agree that there are certain cross-tests that are decidedly stupid.
For three thing: we have no way of knowing ahead of time what's going to be stupidly dangerous and what isn't.

Example: SCP-310 and SCP-1045. What happens when the candle can't burn out? Do the shadows keep writhing? Well, how about we try and find out that Mongolia catches on fire with the Eternal Flame? Sure, they seem like nothing bad would happen, only the Foundation doesn't know that the Candle of Life is just displaying someplace else, and now the Eternal Flame has been transported there, well outside of containment. And ANY crosstest could be like that. The core idea behind every single SCP is that they're NOT understood. And taking two things that you KNOW you don't understand, and are PROBABLY dangerous, and smooshing them together is, well, stupid.

In regards to "chocolate in a volcano", I meant that we really don't have that great an understanding of the universe and what we think we know can change through one discovery. The fact that these things exist already show that a lot of our commonly accepted real-world theories are wrong in the Foundation universe. I don't mean to get 2deep4u here, but the fact is we don't understand anything fully, we just understand these things less. The "chocolate in a volcano" analogy is kinda not helping so I'll just assume you get my point.

Which, if we're going by the assumption that it's possible if we're not 100% certain that it can't be, could also be a chocolate bar. It makes about as much sense as Iris touching Lord Blackwood through a picture causing a ZK event.

I think it's important to make a proper distinction here. Cross-testing is not prohibited, or even discouraged. Rather, there are certain (suggested) guidelines around its usage to prevent it from being detrimental to an article. I can understand where the confusion can come in, in many cases people commenting on a bad article will say something along the lines of "Unnecessary cross-test, downvote". Reading many of these posts sequentially gives the impression that cross-tests are frowned upon. In actuality, the majority of cross-tests are just abused (and summarily deleted, usually along with the article), hence why the majority of them are disliked. A good cross-test will garner positive feedback.

There is nothing wrong with crosstesting from a writing standpoint IN AND OF ITSELF. The problem is with, as Djoric basically said it, how 90% of people who want to do crosstests tend to do them poorly. They either want to do experiments on the popular old articles that have already been tested to DEATH, want to increase the popularity of their own article, or they end up doing some random test that wouldn't even make sense for the Foundation to ever do.

If you had an object that you might in fact be able to understand better by testing it with another SCP, and you felt you could make such a test genuinely interesting, then I would LOVE to see it done.

However, then we hit the second problem….

The Foundation has good reason not to do crosstesting in most circumstances. Yes, this is probably one of the three reasons you hear reiterated so often, but it IS valid. So many of these things violate the laws of reality, some of them in ways that the Foundation hasn't even begun to figure out. And while many of them it would seem initially like there's no harm that could come from testing them with each other, if something is so anomalous then it is a dangerous assumption to ever think you know all of its properties.

What happens if you test your mind switching thing on Able? Perhaps it helps you understand him better….or perhaps you suddenly have caused the other person's consciousness to be obliterated and Able remains, while now Able has a second body that ends up taking on the same properties. Or maybe instead of his mind going into the other body it ends up going into the SCP you used to remove his consciousness, and he gains the ability to imprint his mind onto anyone and everyone in the world. Or maybe him being removed from the body causes the coffin to recognize that it has the wrong person contained, and it begins to destroy everything around it until it gets Able back again. Or maybe you just accidentally killed Able and destroyed an SCP the Foundation wasn't done studying yet. Or maybe for GOD KNOWS WHAT REASON this causes an explosion that destroys the universe.

Many of those might sound ridiculous, but you don't know what's going to happen. Mixing anomalies together gives the potential for creating even greater anomalies. Experimenting on the anomalous is dangerous in the first place even with NORMAL testing materials.

Anyway, that all said, I personally am a fan of crosstesting, I just want to see it done well if it is to be done at all. And it does pain me how rarely I have seen it done well, those times that people attempt it.

In regards to the example, the first thing about Able getting another body that also gains its powers would be the realistic WCS, and even then it would be solvable and we'd learn something. The others make about as much sense as throwing a chocolate bar into a volcano causing a ZK scenario.

So what if they don't make sense? The Foundation doesn't know what's going to happen, and it's not worth the risk of possibly making one or both of the anomalies far worse than they were to begin with. I threw out various extreme scenarios that came to mind. This doesn't mean that I couldn't come up with more believable ones that would be very much worth avoiding as well. Learning "oh, doing that makes it irrevocably more dangerous" is something you want to know, yes, but it's something you want to know without having to actually DO it.

The other guy's thread about using SCP objects in extreme scenarios at least makes sense, because if you already have something terrible that's going to happen then it's at least worth it to try to avoid it if you can with whatever means are available. But that's desperation, last resort, not casual experimentation.

My point is that this argument can be applied to anything, even non-SCPs, because we really don't understand anything (especially in the SCP universe where pretty much everything is proving something wrong). If shouldn't do stuff because it's not impossible for it to destroy the universe, we shouldn't do anything.

but it's turned from "don't do useless cross-tests" to "no cross-testing at all unless you can pull it off well" to "no cross-testing period".

This is not true. We've since shifted to "make damn sure your cross-testing is done well." This is reflected in the FAQ, which is part of the required reading:

Can I cross-test other SCPs in my article? There's no rules against cross-testing, but we don't like it. These are dangerous items we're working with. Most of them act bizarrely enough on their own, and now you want to combine them to see what happens? This ranges from "bad idea" to "extremely dangerous". Plus, cross-testing needs to add to the quality of a piece. You CAN do it, but if you do, you better do it well, and if you are doing it with SCP-682 or SCP-173 or another popular SCP, the odds that you are doing it well are somewhere between zero and zero.

There are two basic concerns here, an in-character and an out-of-character one:

In-character: The existence of the cross-test needs to overcome the concern of "why would the Foundation risk doing this?" There are many ways to get around this concern, from an 'acceptable risk' standpoint, to a 'the possible benefits are high enough' standpoint, but it either needs to be obvious, or be cool enough that readers are willing to fanwank.

Out-of-character: Shoehorning in a popular SCP "just coz" a shitty idea. And even if you think valuable information could be learned in-character, you have to overcome the annoyance of seeing yet another cliche SCP showing up.

Your Able examples misses on both counts.

First off, in-character:

If [we] shouldn't do stuff because it's not impossible for it to destroy the universe, we shouldn't do anything.

This is total bullshit. We wouldn't do the test you suggested on Able because the Foundation is terrified of Able. Object Class: Keter, remember? I'd come up with an example, but I think Rhett's stands on its own. And this test seems too frivolous in the face of what the Foundation might fear the consequences might be.

I don't really agree with Djoric's and Dmatix's 'thematic unity' - at all, actually. "Thematic unity" is at best a reason why the Foundation might be curious. But that's an aside.

This is the shit I'm talking about. Why does it matter how many times it's been tested or how popular the article is if you have a good reason to do it, it adds to the article, and it's done well? At that point you'd just be hating it for the sake of hating it.

Because it's a gigantic cliche. And your idea isn't sufficiently interesting enough to over come the fact that it's a gigantic cliche.

You can do anything if you can make it sufficiently interesting. But you can't skip out on that. And it can't only be interesting to you or one or three other people, which describes your suggestion pretty well.

Put your money where your mouth is and go write some cross tests. I promise the writer police will not show up at your door.

Vezaz had good advice, though it's a pity he's totally wrong about the consequences. The writer police will show up at your door. So you better be prepared to make the majority of them happy, by making these tests interesting. (Some people will downvote based solely on the fact that it's a crosstest, or a crosstest with a popular article, but not everyone.) And also, don't expect to be able to add some tests directly to 076, for instance, but I hope you already knew that.

The rest of what I would normally say has been said already. So I'll end with this:

Crosslinking done well is awesome. (And to a much lesser extent, so is cross-testing.) More people should be doing it. I intend to try to get some writers together to encourage this in the near future.

You are correct if you were pointing out that people tend to jump on people on the forums for making cross-test threads….but that's because there's been a lot of them and it's usually people suggesting the same kinds of things as if we hadn't already heard it before. There it's not about it being bad, it's about it being annoying to see "what would happen if we mixed (popular SCP) with (usually another popular SCP)?" over and over again. Yes it's actually an interesting question and fun to think about, but it's often either the same ideas repeatedly, or it's completely obscure ones nobody cared much about yet, making the test feel inane.

I recommend doing a cross-test or cross-link on any SCP on the "Top Rated" pages that is not: 173, 682, 914, 087, 093, 076, 073, 343, 426, 055, 231, 148, 106, 105, or 423. Do something interesting with one of those other very well liked but not usually experimented with objects, and I'll be interested.

You are correct if you were pointing out that people tend to jump on people on the forums for making cross-test threads….but that's because there's been a lot of them and it's usually people suggesting the same kinds of things as if we hadn't already heard it before.

I've heard this before, but wouldn't it be better to just link to the old discussion or just not participate and leave it alone?

I personally think cross-testing is one of the most interesting ideas within The Foundation. Not necessarily in universe, because that COULD get too overdone and silly, but on forums/discussion pages, why not?

e: There are plenty of things that older members don't like on this site, there are about 15-20 people who get angry at everyone else for doing these things. They include; enjoying any SCP that is old and popular (amgad stfu about able alredy), cross-testing, thinking of how to destroy SCP's, and writing overly ambitious SCP's. You just have to think of them like hipsters, "we liked this first… we're already bored of this… this new thing is better… it's so stupid to like something we don't like." The website might as well be made private to those select few people.

The Foundation is not a scientific organization. It is a security firm. Yes, they do a lot of research, and the scientists who perform the tests are going to be focused on trying to understand these fascinating and mysterious anomalies. But the administration is only going to care about data that can help them better secure, contain, and protect. They aren't going to greenlight an experiment with any level of risk that doesn't seem to lead to a better cage. Even then, the experiment would have to pass a risk-benefit balancing.

This creates a very narrow window of in-universe plausibility for cross-testing concepts. Mixing "safe" anomalies, and most euclids wouldn't get approval because we already pretty much know how to keep them in a box. So almost no risk would be tolerated. Crossing keters and the more elusive of the euclids is more likely to lead to results the powers that be apreciate, but the risk and hence the odds that the proposal would be rejected also increase exponentially.

Cross-testing has a very high suspension of disbelief threshold to overcome, I'd say that it is the hardest plot device in use on this wiki. Consequently, the overwhelming majority fall flat and fail. But the ones that make it over the hurdle are some of the best writing on the site.